Landrieu: Obama will pay politically

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) said Thursday that President Barack Obama will pay a political price for his lack of visibility in the Gulf region during the catastrophic BP oil spill.

“The president has not been as visible as he should have been on this, and he’s going to pay a political price for it, unfortunately,” Landrieu told POLITICO. “But he’s going down tomorrow, he’s made some good announcements today, and if he personally steps up his activity, I think that would be very helpful.”

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Landrieu’s comments came as Obama spoke to reporters in the East Room of the White House, defending his administration’s response to the ecological disaster. The president plans to head to the Gulf to inspect the oil spill on Friday.

“Those who think that we were either slow in our responses or lacked urgency don’t know the facts,” Obama said Thursday. “This has been our highest priority since this crisis occurred.”

But Landrieu, who is seeing her home state’s economy decimated by the spill, said she’s “absolutely not” satisfied with the administration’s response so far. She added, though, that Thad Allen, the former Coast Guard commandant who is overseeing the response to the spill, has support from Republicans and Democrats “across the board.”

Obama has come in for bipartisan criticism from Louisiana. Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican, has faulted the White House effort, while Louisiana native James Carville, a Democratic strategist who helped run President Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, has also been critical of Obama’s response, recently calling it “lackadaisical.”